The events of 2020 / 2021 will shape how talent acquisition operates for years, especially when it comes to recruiting automation. In the past automation in recruiting has often been dismissed as impersonal and ineffective. However, as technology has developed and strategies have changed the immense value and inevitability of automation is becoming clear.
My guest this week is Jeff Uden, Head of Talent for UK supermarket, Iceland. Like all frontline food retailers, Iceland has faced some unprecedented talent acquisition challenges during the pandemic. Jeff gives us an insight into the innovations these challenges have driven, and Iceland’s successful use of automation to radical enhance both the candidate and hiring manager experience.
In the interview, we discuss:
▪ The challenge of hiring 5,500 people in 8 weeks
▪ Maximising simplicity and efficiency in the recruiting process
▪ The critical importance of candidate experience
▪ Automation with a human touch
▪ Keeping hiring managers empowered
▪ Return on investment from technology
▪ Change management and stakeholder engagement
▪ The future of talent acquisition at Iceland
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Transcript:
Matt Alder [00:00:00]:
Support for this podcast comes from Predictive Hire. Predictive Hire is a frontier interview automation solution that solves three pain points in bias, candidate experience and efficiency. Their customers are typically those that receive an enormous amount of applications and are dissatisfied with how much collective time is spent on hiring. Unlike other forms of assessments, which can feel confrontational, Predictive Hires first interview is built on a text based conversation, totally familiar because text is central to our everyday lives. Every candidate gets a chance at an interview by answering five relatable questions. Every candidate also receives personalized feedback AI then reads the candidate’s answers for best fit, translating assessments into personality readings, work based traits and communication skills. Candidates are scored and ranked in real time, making screenings 90% faster. Predictive hire fits seamlessly into your HR tech stack and with it you will get off the Richter. Efficiency, reduce bias and humanize the application process. They call it hiring with heart. To find out more, go to predictivehire.com.
Matt Alder [00:01:36]:
Hi everyone, this is Matt Alder. Welcome to episode 333 of the Recruiting Future podcast. The events of 2020 and 2021 will shape how talent acquisition operates for years, especially when it comes to recruiting automation. In the past, automation in recruiting has often been dismissed as impersonal and ineffective. However, as technology has developed and strategies have changed, the immense value and inevitability of automation is becoming clear. My guest this week is Jeff Uden, Head of Talent for UK supermarket Iceland. Like all frontline food retailers, Iceland has faced some unprecedented talent acquisition challenges during the pandemic. Jeff gives us an insight into the innovations these challenges have driven and Iceland’s successful use of automation to radically enhance both the candidate and hiring manager experience. Hi Jeff and welcome to the podcast. Hi Matt, an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Could you just introduce yourself and tell us what you do?
Jeff Uden [00:02:59]:
Yeah, certainly. So I’m Jeff Uden, I’m head of Talent for Iceland Foods and I’m responsible for all recruitment and training that happens across the Iceland group.
Matt Alder [00:03:09]:
Now, there’s probably a few people listening from outside Europe who may not know exactly who Iceland are and the kind of the scale of the operation. Could you just give us a sort of a quick introduction to Iceland?
Jeff Uden [00:03:20]:
Yeah, I mean Iceland is a major food supermarket within the UK. It has or it’s part of the top 10 supermarkets within the UK and is one of the leading retailers in terms of frozen food.
Matt Alder [00:03:37]:
Now I’ve been trying to get someone on the show who works in frontline retail pretty much ever since the pandemic kicks off, and it’s all of you have been so busy that this is the earliest that I’ve managed it. Tell us about the challenges that you faced from a talent acquisition perspective over the last 12 months.
Jeff Uden [00:03:57]:
I think the word that’s been used for this year has been unprecedented, isn’t it? And that’s come through so often over this past year, certainly. But it’s been no different within the UK retail scene over this crisis, really. When we first started off back in March of last year, we obviously had some sort of idea as to where things were going, and particularly with the lockdown and the impact that that would retail. But we were fortunate in food retail in terms of being one of those essential businesses that were allowed to stay open. What that did mean, though, was that sales dramatically increased for us and we had to therefore increase the number of staff that we had within our stores very, very quickly. And we originally looked for around about 3,000 people to increase our headcount by, but in the end had to recruit circa five and a half thousand people in the space of eight weeks at the start of the pandemic.
Matt Alder [00:05:06]:
Now, I’m presuming that at that point you weren’t set up to recruit that many people that quickly. Would my thinking be right there?
Jeff Uden [00:05:14]:
Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, normally at Christmas we recruit anything between sort of 1200 and 1800 people, and we normally have that lead time of a couple of months on the lead up to Christmas in order to make sure that we’ve recruited that number. But to recruit those five and a half thousand individuals over such a compacted period of time, we certainly weren’t set up to do that level of mass recruitment in that way.
Matt Alder [00:05:43]:
How did it pan out? How did you manage to be successful with it?
Jeff Uden [00:05:47]:
Well, with that particular element of it, what we did was we centralized our recruitment. Our recruitment team took on board the recruiting in order to purely take that additional task away from our store managers. You know, our store managers needed to be in the position of making sure that the customers were still being served and making sure that we were playing our part in terms of feeding the nation. And we, from a recruitment side of things, realized that that was the task that we had to undertake. And so therefore we went through and sifted through all of the relevant applications and carried out the recruitment process.
Matt Alder [00:06:30]:
And what did you learn by going through that process? I know that you’ve done some innovative things since then.
Jeff Uden [00:06:36]:
Yeah, I Mean, the biggest challenge to us was about, despite what we’d always looked at through our recruitment process and that ever increasing or that continuous need to be making sure that things are as simple and as efficient as they possibly be could be. You know, we did find that actually over that particular period of time, that perhaps things weren’t as efficient as they could be. Perhaps things were a little bit more bureaucratic than what they could be. And actually from a candidate experience point of view as well, particularly with dealing with the number of applications that we actually had. So over that particular period of time, we received just shy of 300,000 applications in those eight weeks. And, you know, my concern was also about what was it that the candidates were experiencing out of this? You know, these individuals were coming to us out of a genuine need. And whether that genuine need was about a fear of potentially losing their jobs, whether that need was that they were on furlough and weren’t receiving as much income as they normally would do. Or worse still, you know, there were a number of individuals that unfortunately had lost their roles over that particular period of time. And we needed to make sure that we treated everybody fully, respectfully over that time to help them through their particular situations. And we needed to make sure that that worked for us as well.
Matt Alder [00:08:22]:
And what came out of it, in terms of innovation, did you look at different types of technology? How have you sort of moved forward from there?
Jeff Uden [00:08:29]:
Yeah. So what we wanted to do was, and what we identified was perhaps one of our key blockers about this was that sifting process for us. As I said, over those eight weeks, we dealt with 300,000 applications. And I was in a position where I was going, we don’t know if this crisis will come back. We don’t know if we’ll go back into the same sort of position at a later period of time. But also we knew that we had those peaks of recruitment as well, where we received a significant number of applications and we wanted to be able to slimline that process down for our store managers, make it as effective as possible with the least possible time, but also make it a really solid experience that built confidence for anyone who was actually applying to the business and helped us to, or helped to reinforce the brand of Iceland. And a lot of people who apply for Iceland haven’t actually shopped in an Iceland store and don’t understand what the culture and feel of the business is like. And we wanted to give a really accurate representation of that at the same time. So by having a look at it, I needed to Understand how we could give a great experience at the least possible time, but also making sure that those individuals who were coming to us and were applying to us, we could understand whether or not they were a really solid fit with what we required from somebody working at Iceland.
Matt Alder [00:10:11]:
So was it technology that helped you solve that?
Jeff Uden [00:10:13]:
Yes, it had to be. It was the only way in which we could do it. So I started having a look, and it was actually during those first eight weeks, started having a look at what technology we could possibly use, Whether or not it was through sifting, whether or not it was through testing. And basically it came down to two systems for us. One was based around situational judgments testing, and the other one was this system that we’ve now using through predictive hire. And the main driver behind that was the introduction of artificial intelligence in terms of that assisting us in making some of those initial sifting decisions that we had. But it was also about making sure that wherever possible, the actual process itself felt as human as it possibly could. You know, that’s a key thing around the Iceland culture is around. You know, we talk within Iceland about fields like family. And we certainly want our people to feel like that within our stores. And we want. We need them to understand that our customers are part of that bigger family as well. So we wanted that human touch in there. We wanted people to feel as though they were really respected and they were valued. But also to a point of the store managers had as much influence as they could in terms of making the decisions for the right individuals.
Matt Alder [00:11:47]:
What does your process feel like now from a candidate’s perspective and indeed from a sort of hiring manager perspective?
Jeff Uden [00:11:53]:
So the process is that the hiring manager advertises their relevant vacancies on our applicant tracking system that is left open for a minimum of a week. And what happens is that in the background, individuals then go through apply through whatever channels they want to do that, whether that’s through job boards, whether it’s through our direct website itself, actually go on to there. Now, in terms of that process, again, one of the things that I did was simplified that process right down. And what I was very mindful of was that in a lot of application processes, individuals have to go through and complete a considerable amount of personal detail as part of that application, and always repeating that information depending on how many times that they’re actually applying for different roles. So I wanted to simplify that down. And therefore, at the start of our process, we only actually asked them for four very basic pieces of information. So, for example, name, telephone number, Whether they have the right to actually work within the UK and whether or not they feel as though they can actually get to that place of work, work that they’re applying for. And then that’s it. As the first part of the actual application they then go through and they then complete the Predictive Hire initial first interview. And that interview is a text based interview where we ask them just five questions. And those five questions were completely customized by Iceland. We looked at what we wanted from our culture, we looked at what we wanted from our people and created those questions, but worked closely with Predictive Hire in order to ensure that the right behaviors were being measured by those questions. So the individuals go through complete those questions and it looks just like a text conversation that would be happening over anyone’s phone. There’s a couple of text bubbles that actually come up, explain what is happening with this type of interview. Somebody can watch a video that then explains it as well. But we simply go through and ask them the questions and then the individuals just type in their answers using whether that’s their, you know, the laptop or tablet keyboards or alternatively on the phone. And we ask them for anything between 50 and 150 words per question and they go through complete those five questions. And the average time that people take on there is anything between about, about 18 and 20 minutes in order to actually be completing those questions. Once those questions are completed, the results are analysed very, very quickly and then we determine whether they go on to second stage or not.
Matt Alder [00:15:07]:
And what kind of results are you seeing from that so far?
Jeff Uden [00:15:10]:
So for us, we are seeing some fantastic results. The sifting has significantly reduced on average, in a normal calendar year, we were receiving circa 500,000 applications a year. And this year, by the end of this financial year in March, we probably will have received about 1.6 million applications this time around. Now, based on that average of the 500,000 applications in a year, our store managers are spending circa 35,000 hours a year actually conducting and doing recruitment, whether that’s sifting or actually completing applications, or alternatively updating our HR information systems. Now what we’ve done is through this is we’ve significantly reduced that down to around about 7,500 hours a year instead. So it’s a massive return of time to our managers and they are now using that to spend more time with their people in the stores and doing the activities that managers should be doing in stores as opposed to just that recruitment part of it. The other benefits that we’re getting out of it is the candidate Experience. Now our candidates are actually at scoring as an 8.9 out of 10 in terms of the candidate experience that they’re actually going through. And also what it’s doing is as well is it is significantly impacting their perception about Iceland. And with us, 64% of all of the applicants said that they were more likely to shop in ICELAND. Now, over 70% of them said that they were more likely to recommend Iceland as an employer. And that’s the sort of benefits that we were never able to understand before, but we know will be impacting the business further down the line.
Matt Alder [00:17:24]:
Now there’ll be lots of talent acquisition leaders listening who are currently in the process of looking at how they transform their approach to talent acquisition, most likely using. Using technology. You’ve obviously done something quite dramatic very quickly with some, with some great results. What advice would you give to people who are looking to make this kind of change in terms of. In terms of how they manage that internally and get people tie into the change and make it happen?
Jeff Uden [00:17:52]:
As any talent acquisition leader will know, a critical part of installing any sort of change in that is about involving that business right from the very outset, understanding what the size of the issue actually is, understanding what the size of the prize is, but then involving as many people across the business as you possibly can in terms of the project, the testing of the project, taking on board all of their relevant feedback and making sure that they were as comfortable about the experience as what potentially the candidates were actually going to be as well. So, you know, we tested our product with senior leaders throughout the business, we tested our products with hiring managers just so that they could see what potentially it could be giving them and how they could actually use that. But also we took it out to our frontline colleagues, colleagues out in our stores, and said to them, if you were to experience this right at the very beginning, how would you feel about it? And there was a unanimous view that came back and said that they would have thoroughly enjoyed actually going through that process and would have felt that it was more relaxing, more enjoyable than perhaps that initial, quite nervy first interview. So that’s where it needs to be. It is about that buy in right before we even start the change process and just making sure that people understand the simplicity of the new process that’s actually coming through and making it incredibly easy to understand.
Matt Alder [00:19:39]:
So, final question. What’s next? What does the future of talent acquisition at Iceland look like for us?
Jeff Uden [00:19:47]:
We are expanding out how we’re using the AI tool from Predictive Hire at the Moment, we’re looking at other areas within the business that we can actually be expanding that out to. We’re looking at some other new technologies for specific populations within the business. But for us, it is about that key part around making sure that the human element is never lost as part of that process. The candidate experience is absolutely our number one focus in the recruitment program for us as a talent team from the recruitment side. And we’re just constantly enhancing what that is like. I think we’re in a situation at the moment where, you know, we’ve got high levels of unemployment in the uk. We will no doubt go to even higher levels of unemployment in the uk and these individuals that are applying to us are applying for a whole variety of different reasons, but they’re applying out of necessity. And whatever that necessity is is down to them as individuals. But we have to treat them with respect. We have to treat them as individuals actually out in the workplace. And we have to show them what Iceland can be like. And that will be my continuous push around it. And evolving how we’re doing the reporting, evolving how we’re feeding back to the candidates using predictive hire and their personality testing that they actually do. That has all got to be our focus at the moment. We cannot afford to be and we won’t be a business that happily accepts applications all the way through and blindly sends an email that talks about if you don’t hear from us in three weeks time, then, you know, take it that you haven’t got the role. We do not want to be in that position. We want to treat everyone as humans.
Matt Alder [00:22:00]:
Jeff, thank you very much for talking to me.
Jeff Uden [00:22:03]:
Thank you.
Matt Alder [00:22:04]:
My thanks to Jeff Uden. You can subscribe to this podcast in Apple Podcasts, on Spotify or via your podcasting app of choice. Please also follow the show on Instagram. You can find us by searching for Recruiting Future. You can search all the past episodes@recruitingfuture.com on that site. You can also subscribe to the mailing list to get the inside track about everything that’s coming up on the show. Thanks very much for listening. I’ll be back next time and I hope you’ll join me.
